💵 Introducing Device Buyback + Your worst shadow AI offenders

Without further ado: today's agenda.

💸 First, we're sounding off about an exciting new feature around here at Rippling IT. Device Buyback is officially live! Turn those old laptops you've got lying around into cash back.

🤖 Then we’ll talk about who just might be the biggest shadow AI risk at your whole company. (Spoiler: It's your leadership team. Yes, even your CISO.)

Let's get into it.

 💸 Now Live: Device Buyback

Why collect dust when you could be collecting cash instead? Introducing Device Buyback: secure device disposal that quite literally pays for itself.

Many companies have thousands of dollars in unused hardware just lying around, depreciating by the day. Worse yet, those devices are loaded with all kinds of sensitive company data, making them too much of a security liability to make getting rid of them a simple operation. 

Until now, that is. Turn your retired hardware into cash back with Rippling IT. Select your unused devices, get instant resale values, and sell them in bulk in just a few clicks. 

Rippling handles every step from there on down, from MDM unenrollment to secure data wiping, and applies those credits to your next invoice.

One of our beta customers at HeadLight told us, "We sold back enough old laptops through Rippling Inventory Management that it covered over a year of our subscription. It basically paid for itself."

Device Buyback closes the loop on the device lifecycle, from purchase to retirement, all in one. No shipping to third-party resellers. No negotiating with sales reps. Just instant value recovery for hardware you're not using anyway.

Read the full announcement here.

And join tomorrow's session on Device Lifecycle Management to get the latest on our new Device Buyback feature and how that fits into Rippling IT's end-to-end automation of the full device lifecycle. Register now!

🤖 When Leadership is Your Biggest Shadow AI Risk

Executives are 50% more likely to use shadow AI than more junior employees, according to a recent report from UpGuard. And 69% of CISOs (you know, the folks who are literally responsible for a company's security posture?) are using unapproved AI tools daily.

The report also found something a teensy bit ironic. Employees who received AI safety training and understand the risks are more likely to regularly use unapproved tools. Those are the users who know the risks, and are armed with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. In part due to their training, they're more confident they can handle the risks themselves. What are you supposed to do about that?

Snap's Director of IT, JR Lam, chalks this up to an enablement problem. The marketing team needs to generate content quickly. Finance needs to analyze data. HR wants to screen resumes efficiently. And when you don't give them sanctioned tools that actually work, they'll find their own.

So JR frames it as an opportunity for partnership. "Even though there's something cool and shiny out there that you want, still have a conversation with us. Because at some point, you're gonna need security and legal review. Do you wanna do that on your own? Or do you want to hook up with us and we can walk through it together?"

Here's your 3-point playbook.

• Map the sprawl: Talk to department heads about what AI tools are already in use. They might not have every answer, but just reaching out can get you much closer to the ground truth.

• Build a fast-track approval process: Create an intake system that can actually compete with reckless one-off downloads. If your approval process takes three weeks, employees will keep going rogue.

• Give people a sanctioned "place to land": Provision approved AI tools quickly across so employees have less need to hunt for alternatives.

For more on securing AI tools, check out our Agentic AI Security Toolkit.

And stay tuned for more advice from today’s IT and security pros every week. If you have a question you’d like us to answer, submit it here.

Speaking of sprawl! 90% of IT teams need 3 or more software tools just to onboard a single employee. And wrangling all those software tools isn't just a headache, either. Every manual task and integration gap presents a new security risk.

Our new State of Software Sprawl data report reveals how IT teams are stuck triaging software security gaps instead of proactively protecting the business.

Read the IT section of our report, and see where your org stacks up.

📚 Some light reading

☑️ Read: Europe's IT spend to surge 11% as cloud sovereignty fever takes hold (The Register)

☑️ Read: 3 in 10 firms plan to replace workers with AI next year (CIO Dive)

☑️ Read: With AI agents, will IT pros be able to find entry-level roles? (IT Brew)

☑️ Read: Chinese spies used Claude to break into critical orgs (The Register)

☑️ Read: Migration issues cost businesses $315k per project, study finds (CIO Dive)

🙌🏼 Group therapy

"I inherited 600 users with zero documentation and a network just barely holding together. Every user has local admin and IT-set passwords they've never changed. We ran out of IP addresses because nothing was documented. When I presented my cleanup plan, leadership said 'sounds good, but can you also handle our Slack migration next month?' Sure, let me just tack that on. How do you balance doing... basically everything?" ~ Anonymous IT hero 

Do you have an IT horror story? Share here to be featured in a future issue.

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